At the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, a group of apes hovers around an object that has suddenly appeared in the desert. The sleek, black, rectangular object is five times as tall as the apes and clearly crafted by intelligent beings. The apes approach it with caution, and one animal runs a timid hand along the clean edges that glimmer in the sunlight.
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